PubMed will soon be accepting non-English abstracts into the database.  Users will be able to see the additional language abstracts on the Abstract display page.  When first viewing the abstract page for a record, the default will be to the English abstract.  When there is a non-English abstract as well, there will be a link to it immediately above the English abstract.  To view the non-English abstract, users can click on the link which is the name of the language, e.g. French.

Non-English abstracts will be available only in the Abstract display option and not in the Summary, MEDLINE or XML displays.   For articles which have only a non-English abstract, the default will not be to display the abstract, but users will be able to click the link to display it.  See an example from the NLM Technical Bulletin.

Keywords provided by authors can now be found in selected PubMed records if supplied by the publishers.   The keywords can be incorporated into search strategies unqualified or using the tags [OT] – Other Term or [TW] – Text Words.  Author keywords can be seen in the Abstract, MEDLINE and XML displays of records.  In the Abstract Display, they are found below the abstract.  An example can be found in the NLM Technical Bulletin announcement of this new feature.

MEDLINE is the journal citation database of the National Library of Medicine.  It contains biomedical and life sciences references dating back to 1946 garnered from about 5,600 scholarly journals.  MEDLINE is a subset of the PubMed database and a PubMed search can be limited to MEDLINE records using the Journal Categories filter.  Every record in the MEDLINE database has been indexed with the NLM controlled vocabulary, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). Continue reading →